One of the stories in this issue of the Stabroek Business seeks to draw attention to the October 23-28 2022 Trade Americas, Caribbean Region Trade Mission and Business Conference the purpose of which, as we understand it, seeks to afford potential American investors opportunities to peruse the region for investment openings including, in what one hopes, might be instances of joint venture undertakings that benefit our own businesses as well as job creation.
What would also be more than a little helpful is if those US investments bring with them worthwhile jobs, that is to say jobs that not only pay well but also raise skills levels in areas that will serve us well as the skills demands of an ‘oil and gas economy’ grow.
The forum, one hopes will attract worthwhile participation at the levels of both government and the private sector and that our engagements with the would-be investors from the United States would take account of both the particular job requirements of the country as well as long neglected communities across the country where jobs are needed.
One makes this point conscious of the fact that, for the most part, such engagements as the forthcoming one usually attract mostly the participation of coastal business operatives and that the deliberations that occur never really bring too many returns in terms of employment for communities too far outside our urban centres.
What all this means is that if the forthcoming forum is to be of any real value to the country as a whole, our engagements with the American business tycoons must assume a strategic underpinning that is undergirded by what, as a country, we need to extract from those encounters.
There had been a time not many moons ago when it might have been felt, particularly amongst our coastal population, that the discovery of oil and gas, specifically the recovery process, would generate many lucrative jobs that would place large numbers of Guyanese in the belly of the (oil recovery) beast, so to speak. That notion has long been snuffed out by the understanding that oil recovery and all that it entails requires skills that we lack and that the best that we can do, at least for now, is to try to find places on lesser rungs of the employment ladder. One hastens to say, of course, that the longer our offshore oil recovery persists the greater the opportunity for Guyanese to incrementally upgrade their skills in some of the areas that have to do with the discipline.
What our oil and gas ambitions have done for us up to this time is to raise the trajectory of our all-round ambitions. At the level of education there now appears to exist an enhanced sense of excitement about what one might call ‘technical skills.’ Feedback at the Secondary School level as well as at institutions like our Technical Institutes point to an enhanced interest in technical skills while the advent of programmes like the STEM Guyana initiative would appear to have converted significant numbers of quite young children to the discipline of information technology. Truth be told, the dispositional transformation has been dramatic.
It is at this juncture, of course, that we need to raise our game. Disciplines that have to do with science and entrepreneurship must begin to occupy more prominent positions on the curricula of training institutions across the board.
Development, of course, requires vision and truth be told the jury continues to be decidedly ‘out’ on the issue of whether or not the country’s development trajectory has been supported by a generous measure of vision. Over more than half a century of independence, it remains difficult to identify what one might call landmark achievements in any sphere of our country’s development.
Oil cannot and will not change everything. Where the planning and the focus associated with change (and change here means going forward as a nation) is lacking there can be no change. Where there is absence of what one might call a ‘national ambition’ to see ourselves as ‘working for each other,’ where, in the final analysis, material investment does not take account of where such investment will take us, all of us, as a nation, then oil or no oil , we are on a hiding to nowhere.
To return to the October 23-28 2022 Trade Americas Forum, it provides an opportunity for our business community to prepare a blueprint (which will have to be tinkered with from time to time) for long-term investments in a growing economy. This must be configured in a manner that allows us, as Guyanese, to benefit from a fair piece of the pie. One makes this point conscious of the ever present dangers of an approach to what we often loosely describe as ‘development’ that leaves significant swathes of our society behind.
